1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a semiconductor test system with self-inspection of an electrical channel for a Pogo tower and, more particularly, to a test system for use in a test equipment for IC package.
2. Background of the Invention
In the industry of semiconductor package test, the test bench (machine) for testing dominates an absolutely important role. If the test bench or equipment is in failure or out of order, big loss in cost will be incurred. In addition, in many occasions of incurring failure or an abnormal condition, the bench or equipment itself will not inform or notify the situation and it is hard to trace back when the failure or abnormal condition starts, which quite often results in a serious event of taking back. Not only loss of cost is generated, but also reputation of the company will be affected.
Pogo pins are used to directly contact a chip or wafer to be tested for testing. As the Pogo pins obtain test parameters and send them back through electrical channels on a load board, due to that the Pogo pins on the Pogo tower or the electrical channels are up to many hundreds, inspection of electrical properties thereof indeed meets with problem. Further, since the Pogo pins and the electrical channels play a rather important role, once one inside them is damaged or in an abnormal condition, such as in an unexpected open circuit or short circuit, or in leakage, the whole test quality or test result will be affected.
Although each of the global enterprises in semiconductor test equipments possesses its own techniques of self-inspection for the test bench, the techniques are directed to inspecting the whole equipment, including inspections one by one on each part of the bench and each of the sub-systems. Such inspections waste much time and human labors. As far as the existing techniques are concerned, there is no provision of a system or method of inspecting an electrical channel for a Pogo tower capable of rapid and effective inspection and adaptively for use in all kinds of equipments produced by the enterprises.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved semiconductor test system with self-inspection of an electrical channel for a Pogo tower to mitigate and/or obviate the aforementioned problems.